Weak and inconsistent decision making

I once hired someone who walked out on us during the lunch break on his first day.

Yep, ouch, not my best moment.

This happened when I was building the Customer Care team at Gousto. I only had one year of work experience at that point, so as with everything else, I figured my way through hiring. With beginner’s luck, I managed to hire two brilliant people for the team. The guy who walked out 2 hours after he joined was my third hire, and he definitely wasn’t a good fit.

Admittedly, I didn’t know what great hiring practices looked like back then.

Fast forward to today, I have witnessed many examples of poor hiring practices being the root cause of bad hires. In my research calls with dozens of recruitment experts, this has also come up consistently as a major pain point.

According to them, a job spec, an assessment rubric, and scorecards are the holy trinity of great hiring practices. They are the artefacts to help hiring managers think through these important questions:

• What do I need done?

• Who is best to do it?

• How do I tell if they are good?

If any of them are missing, or done badly, then getting an A player is like playing the lottery. It makes perfect sense: if you don’t know who you are looking for, you are not going to find them.

The reality is, many hiring managers out there are in the same shoes as I was: they don’t know what great looks like. And most of them won’t get the recruitment training they need before they start hiring.

That’s why it’s super important to me that Wolven is built to support hiring managers in adopting best-in-class hiring practices.

And it looks like this: When a hiring manager gives Wolven a brief, it will prepare the assessment rubric, job description, application form, hiring process and interview questions before publishing the job posting. This process is designed to help them think through who they are looking for. It also has guardrails in place to guide the hiring teams in making fair and objective decisions backed by evidence.

Solutions such as screening CVs, pairing candidates with roles and conducting AI interviews may seem like the obvious answer to today’s recruitment challenges. But I strongly believe that only by solving the core problem of hiring practice quality, will teams consistently find the A players they need to take their businesses to the next level.